Maha Nassar

On her book Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World

Cover Interview of March 11, 2018

In a nutshell

When people hear the term “Palestinians,” they usually think
of people living in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, or in refugee
camps and small communities scattered around the world. My book focuses on a
group of Palestinians, who remained within Israel’s borders after the end of
the 1948 War, and are not talked about as much. Most of them were granted
Israeli citizenship in 1952, making them a small minority (about 13%) in the
new Jewish state. However, their citizenship was not of equal status to that of
Jewish Israelis, and they faced a host of discriminatory measures.

While other studies have rightly placed these discriminatory
practices within the framework of settler-colonialism, I focus on how
Palestinians—especially intellectuals—linked their position in Israel to larger
global developments. The 1950s and 1960s were a time when colonized and
semi-colonized people in the Arab world and beyond were contesting the various forms
of subjugation they faced, and these larger global forces had a distinct impact
on Palestinians in Israel.

Brothers Apart places the cultural and intellectual
history of these Palestinian citizens of Israel within this global landscape
and examines their relationship with the decolonizing world of the
mid-twentieth century. I adopt a transnational framework that de-centers the
Israeli state and centers instead on these intellectuals’ own worldviews. In
doing so, I show how they saw the links between their conditions and those of
other subjugated peoples, as well as how they drew inspiration from decolonizing
movements around the world.

One remarkable aspect of this intellectual movement is that it
occurred at a time when Palestinian citizens of Israel were quite isolated
geographically and politically. They could not travel to Arab countries, and
they could not freely import newspapers or periodicals. Brothers Apart reveals
several strategies of resistance that Palestinian intellectuals in Israel
adopted in their situation of isolation, such as sneaking Arabic texts across
the border from neighboring countries, then surreptitiously reading and
exchanging them with one another. They also developed a small but increasingly
vibrant local press scene that connected them and their readers to broader
intellectual and cultural developments. The most active group in this period
was the Communist Party of Israel, whose publications were also the most
critical of Israeli policies. As a result, they faced a great deal of censorship,
which they struggled to overcome.

On one level, readers will recognize Brothers Apart
as a historical study that sheds new light on the history of Palestinians and
the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. On a broader level, I hope readers will also
see in this book a fascinating case study of how marginalized intellectuals can
use cultural and journalistic writings—including newspapers, literary journals,
and poetry—to not only resist the oppression they face at home, but also to reach
out to (and sometimes challenge) their fellow intellectuals abroad.

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011